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My Vote and My Pairwise Preference

Following Grover’s urging, I’m revealing my vote and my pairwise preference in the presidential contest. My vote in safely Democratic New York is for Libertarian Gary Johnson, but I do have a slight pairwise preference for Romney-Ryan over Obama-Biden. The reason is that while both sets of candidates are equally bad on all sorts of issues, as Marc notes below, the PPACA (Obamacare) really is a tiebreaker. It’s not just that the PPACA is bad policy, but also that it vitiates an important area of federalism. The feds have summarily executed all the state-level experiments in regulating and providing health insurance. The free-market option of permitting low-mandate, high-deductible, low-cost policies to expand coverage has forever been foreclosed. If Obama wins, the PPACA will go into effect and will never be repealed, and another chunk of American federal institutions will go down the drain forever.

Of course, the PPACA will only be repealed if Republicans take both the presidency and the Senate, the probability of which must hover around something like 3% at this stage. If I lived in a swing state, I might well cast my first-ever vote for a Republican in a presidential general election, but I don’t, so I won’t.

Randy Barnett’s argument that we shouldn’t vote Libertarian because it only encourages them to continue existing does not persuade me. The Libertarian Party provides a safe harbor for principled votes when both Democrats and Republicans are genuinely terrible (have we forgotten George W. Bush, Tommy Thompson, et al. so soon?). They also help keep the two parties, especially Republicans, aware of the possibility of being punished by libertarian voters for bad policy decisions, theoretically promoting good policies in the long run even if facilitating some short-run defeats of “lesser of two evils” candidates. Now, admittedly, this strategic role would work much better if Libertarian candidates were strategic about the races they enter (why in the world is a Libertarian running against Jeff Flake in Arizona?), but even so, I would regret very much the demise of the Libertarian Party as a national political option.

2 Responses

The deed is done. Also voted L in the U.S. Senate race, which is a blowout in the polls. Voted R in the U.S. House race, because the R is a really good guy – but he has no chance. I’ve got to get out of this state.

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